The Istanbul Puzzle (4 page)

‘Some Greeks say the last emperor made a pact with the devil that afternoon. That his body was taken below Hagia Sophia and that he will come back, and retake this city when the time is right. So you must understand, Mr Ryan, a Greek being murdered in Hagia Sophia is a big deal.’

‘I don’t believe in legends and I don’t think Alek did either.’ I gave him the kind of smile I reserved for younger children. ‘Our Institute was commissioned by UNESCO to do a simple task here; to verify how the mosaics in Hagia Sophia are being preserved and altered over the years. That’s what Alek was working on. It’s not a big project.’ The air in the room was getting stuffy, thick.

‘There isn’t even a UNESCO representative overseeing us. We’re just recording things, monitoring changes. None of this stuff could have anything to do with what happened to Alek.’

The smell of hospital disinfectant was getting stronger too.

‘UNESCO is monitoring Hagia Sophia?’ he said.

‘We’re taking pictures, inspector.’ Frustrated, I held up my hands. ‘Thousands of tourists do it every day.’ I had to move the conversation on. ‘Can you at least tell me where Alek was found?’

He looked at me as if he was debating whether to say anything more or not. Then he continued. ‘Your colleague was found outside Hagia Sophia early yesterday morning.’ He studied my face. ‘His head was near his body. For that we can be grateful.’

‘He was beheaded?’ I said it slowly.

‘Yes.’ He said, matter-of-factly.

My stomach flipped. I thought about what Alek must have gone through. I held my hand to my chest. The pressure had got stronger.

And the room seemed suddenly smaller, as if its walls had moved in.

He said something I didn’t understand. The words were in English, but I couldn’t make them out.

The fact that Alek had died was bad enough. That he’d been butchered like an animal was too much. This was why they hadn’t pulled the sheet down. I’d been right about his body looking odd. This was sick.

I walked towards the wall, leaned my forehead against it. A wave of revulsion rolled through me. The white tiles were shiny, slick.

How could any human do such a thing?

‘I don’t believe this,’ I whispered. Then I remembered something.

There’d been a story in one of the Sunday newspapers about a decapitation. No details. Just a one paragraph story. Had it been about Alek?

It had all seemed so distant when I’d been reading it. I must have read lots of stories like it. Of atrocities, horrible deaths. There were so many that few registered any more. I swallowed hard.

‘Did what happened to Alek get into the newspapers?’ I turned to face the inspector. He was standing by the table.

‘The media here hunts for such stories these days.’ His tone was hard. ‘There may have been a small item in a Turkish newspaper yesterday. I promise you, we did not give out his name.’

I closed my eyes. Would the media in England find out what had happened to Alek? Would people be tweeting about it soon, speculating about the details? I could only guess what theories would come up, how it would all spin out.

‘Does this sort of thing happen often in Turkey?’

‘This is the first case of beheading in three years. We are not Iraq.’

‘So why did this happen to Alek?’

He shrugged, looked me up and down. ‘Are you planning to speak to the press?’ he said.

‘No.’

His face was a hard mask. ‘Good. We’ll be finished with your colleague’s body in a week or so. There’ll be an autopsy, of course.’ I closed my eyes. ‘You can make arrangements for his body after the results are in. We will hand over all his personal belongings then. ’ His tone softened. He was playing the understanding official again.

Where will you be staying, Mr Ryan?’

‘The Conrad-Ritz. Where Alek is… I mean was staying.’ Alek had told me about the place. I’d called it from Heathrow.

‘My driver will take you there.’

I nodded.

‘Make no mistake,’ he said. ‘We value human life in Turkey, Mr Ryan, unlike in some places. We take a crime like this seriously. As you will see.’

He took a shiny black leather notebook out of his pocket and began writing in it. I wanted to leave, to be on my own, to think.

‘Are we finished?’ I said.

‘Just a few more questions.’

I didn’t say anything.

‘Can you tell me exactly what Mr Zegliwski was monitoring in Hagia Sophia, Mr Ryan?’

I wanted to snap at him. I was too tired for this.

‘The tesserae, inspector. The tiny cubes that make up the mosaics. In Hagia Sophia a lot of them were preserved by the plaster Ottoman workmen covered them with, to conform to Islamic prescriptions against figurative art.’ I spoke slowly. ‘Gradually those mosaics have been exposed. Now we have a chance to record them digitally using the latest techniques, in case they’re damaged in the future. It will help us understand how they’ve changed over time by comparing the images with drawings made over the centuries, which we are also digitizing.’

He made a note in his book.

‘Do you think any of this could be a reason for someone to kill your colleague?’ He stared at me, his hand poised to write.

‘Inspector, the layers of gold that form the sandwich that make up many of the tesserae in Hagia Sophia are thicker and more valuable than those anywhere else in the world. Perhaps he disturbed someone robbing some gold tesserae.’ It was a theory I’d come up with on the plane. Alek had joked about how valuable the larger mosaics were, even broken up.

He took another note. Then he said, ‘Did Mr Zegliwski send anything to you or to your Institute after coming here?’

What was he implying? That we’d been stealing, illegally exporting artefacts, not just photographing them?

‘No, he sent us nothing but digital images. There’s no law against that.’

He closed his notebook. Then, as an afterthought, he said, ‘Do you know about the Orthodox Christian archives, the ones that are missing, Mr Ryan?’

I wiped my forehead. A slick of cold sweat covered it. Alek lay dead a few feet away, beheaded for God’s sake, and this man wanted to know about archives!

‘I don’t,’ I replied. ‘Are we finished?’

‘You didn’t know they were lost when Hagia Sophia was taken over?’

I shook my head. ‘We’re here to record mosaics inspector, nothing else.’

‘Indeed, but any item discovered in the archives would have immense value. They included a letter from Mohammad, peace be upon him, so it is claimed. You can imagine the interest there would be in that. They say it was addressed to Emperor Heraclius, the Byzantine Emperor at the time. He visited Jerusalem when the Prophet was in Arabia awaiting his return to Mecca. Such a letter would have a major impact if it was found. It might even be considered important in England, no?’

‘Our project has nothing to do with lost archives or lost letters.’

Why was he quizzing me about this stuff? Did the Turkish authorities really think our project was more than it seemed?

On the way up in the lift, the inspector smiled at me. It was the smile of a reptile as it sunned itself, while waiting for its prey to come within reach. He patted my shoulder as I climbed into the police car.

‘Take care. We wouldn’t want anything to happen to you in our beautiful city.’

I doubted very much that he gave a damn about what happened to me.

In Whitehall, in central London, not far from Downing Street, Sergeant Henry P Mowlam was looking out the window. The office he was in had a spectacular view over the London Eye. It was rotating, imperceptibly, against a backdrop of blue sky and the puffiest clouds he’d seen all year. His own office didn’t have a view like this.

‘Sergeant Mowlam,’ said a voice.

He turned. The meeting had been organised by the Ministry of Defence. The conference room, with its dark panelled walls, held over twenty people. Just his luck to get called the second he’d got a proper look out the window.

‘Yes, sir.’

The brigadier general who was leading the meeting from the top of the shiny oak conference table looked around the room, as if wondering who had replied.

Sergeant Mowlam coughed. ‘How can I help?’ he said.

‘I was saying, Sergeant Mowlam, that we have some new chatter that’s just come in. Can you give us the latest on it?’

‘We’ve been picking up email and Twitter feeds this morning, sir. We discount most of this sort of stuff, but these messages are between the organisers of the demonstration planned for Friday. They are about supplies. Shall I read them out?’

The general nodded.

The driver sped through the still-busy streets. I was in the back again. Inspector Erdinc had stayed in the hospital. His other colleague had disappeared. My forehead was pounding as if I had a migraine.

A lot of things had been stirred up in me in the last few hours. There were so many links to the past in this city. So much was different here.

My fists were clenched as we sped onto a wide, low bridge. It had black chest-high iron railings on each side. Below, eel-black water slid past. On the far side of the bridge the shadow of a hill loomed, crowned with the spot-lit outlines of Topkapi Palace, the palace of the Ottoman Sultans, and the dome of Hagia Sophia. The dome was glowing with yellow light, and with its four minarets it looked like an oil painting come to life. Above, stars shone weakly through a haze. We were crossing the Golden Horn.

I asked the driver how soon we would get to the hotel. He didn’t answer. I had only one word of Turkish –
Merhaba
, hello – so I decided to shut up.

He stared at me in his rear-view mirror. Then he touched one of those blue and white circular evil-eye charms they hang everywhere in Turkey. When we stopped at the traffic lights on the far side of the bridge he spoke.

‘Your friend, he played a dangerous game, no?’

His eyes were fixed on the rear-view mirror.

I looked over my shoulder. There was a car with blacked-out windows behind us.

‘It shouldn’t have been dangerous,’ I said.

He tutted, as if he didn’t believe me. The lights changed. We sped on, cutting across two lanes in a way that would have spelled disaster in London.

He turned the radio on. A wild song filled the car, part Arab lament, part Latin dance beat. Then he turned the radio down, as if he’d remembered he shouldn’t be playing music while on official business.

Then we were rumbling up a cobbled street and after another tight turn, with the minarets and dome of Hagia Sophia looming over us, we stopped in front of a parchment- yellow building. It was an Ottoman era, five-tier, wedding-cake of an edifice. It dominated one whole side of a narrow and steep side street.

Alek had picked the hotel, he’d said, because it was in the oldest part of Istanbul, near the summit of the hill Hagia Sophia was on. That was where the original Greek colony had been founded by someone called Byzas hundreds of years before Alexander the Great’s family even owned a single olive tree.

The site had been chosen for reasons any child would understand. It was easily defendable. It had water on three sides; the Sea of Marmara, the Bosphorus, and the Golden Horn.

Not far from the hotel were the remnants of the old Roman Hippodrome, a stadium Ben Hur might have raced in.

The Roman imperial legacy here was only part of the history of the place though. Within strolling distance of the hotel was the palace and harem of the Ottoman sultans, rulers of an empire which at one time stretched from Egypt almost to Vienna.

I stepped out of the car. Old stone walls and sun-bleached Ottoman-era buildings lined the street. The hotel brooded above me. It felt strange, unsettling, to be following in Alek’s footsteps, seeing things he’d seen only a few days before.

I stood for a moment watching the police car pull away. I could smell jasmine on the warm air, hear laughter, voices. I touched the yellow plaster of the hotel wall as I climbed the stairs from the street.

As soon as I entered the building I was hit by a blast of air conditioning. The smiling lady behind the glass-topped ultra-modern reception desk had the blondest hair I’d seen in a long time. She was friendly, and very sympathetic, after I gave her my name and told her I was a colleague of Alek’s.

‘We are all so sorry about what happened. We heard from the police that Mr Zegliwski had an accident. It’s terrible. He was so nice. What happened to him? Do you know?’

‘Yes.’ I didn’t feel like telling her though, so I added. ‘And thanks. I appreciate your concern.’

She smiled, then held a finger in the air, as if she was trying to remember something. After a moment, she said, ‘There’s something here for Mr Zegliwski.’

She turned, scanned the pigeon holes that filled the wall behind her until she found what she was looking for – a large brown envelope. She held it out in front of her triumphantly, to show me what was written on it.
Mr Zegliwski.

I took the envelope. As I walked to the lift I squeezed it gently. It felt like there were a few sheets of paper in it, and something else at the bottom.

A man in a puffy black jacket stared at me from an oversized leather sofa at the far end of the reception area. He gave me the creeps. I imagined his corpulent boss entertaining some underage hooker or three upstairs.

As I waited for the lift to reach the fifth floor, I slid my finger under the flap of the envelope and looked inside. A silver key-ring, with one of those USB memory sticks attached, lay in the bottom of the envelope. I pulled it out, looked at it, then put it in my pocket. The only other thing in the envelope were some photos.

I almost dropped them on the white marble floor of the hallway as I juggled my room card and bag. It wasn’t until I was inside that I got a chance to look at the photos properly.

One of them was of a woman with long black hair and a winning smile. Alek had clearly been busy. Something tightened in my chest. Did she know what had happened to him? My shoulders hunched, as the weight of his death bore down on me. There was one thing I was going to promise myself, and Alek. Whatever happened, I would find out who had done this.

I steadied myself, looked at the photos again.

Two didn’t fit with the rest. One was of a crumbling floor mosaic. Debris lay scattered around it. The other was of the inside of a brick-lined tunnel. It had an arched ceiling, sloping downwards. A yellow marble plaque hung on the wall near the top of the tunnel. I could just about make out what was carved on it; scales with a sword lying across its pans.

I put the photos on the round table near the window. I couldn’t make sense of them now. And I didn’t want to think about them. I looked around. The room was a pastiche of late Ottoman style, decorated in reds and golds. Every piece of furniture was covered in a thick layer of varnish.

After a quick shower I turned off the bedside light and lay staring at the shadows, my mind drifting. A faint aroma came to me. The smell of roses. It reminded me of Irene. It would have been good to be able to call her now, to talk all this through with her.

When I met Irene she’d been studying medicine. She hadn’t been interested in me initially, but I found out she used to drink in the university bar before getting her train home. A week later we had our first date. A walk in Hyde Park. She was a great listener.

We got married three months after I graduated. One of her friends used to tease us about how perfect our lives were, how lucky we’d both been to be doing so well so soon after graduating.

And then she’d volunteered to go to Afghanistan with the Territorial Army. They needed doctors. Three of them had volunteered from her hospital. That had been reassuring. I’d imagined stupidly, so stupidly, that that meant there would be safety in numbers. That the odds were against all three of them being killed. Their tour started two years and three months ago.

And she was the one who didn’t make it back. A roadside bomb, an IED – an Improvised Explosive Device – killed her two weeks into the mission.

And for a long time I felt powerless and angry, all at the same time. Irene had been about all that was good about England. All she’d ever wanted to do was help people. It wasn’t right that she’d died. Not for one second.

For months after it happened I fantasised about her walking through our front door. And I used to hope, despite everything logical, that I’d wake up one day to find her beside me again.

Tragedy warps everything.

I was slipping away, on the edge of consciousness, back in London, walking towards Buckingham Palace. A man in a long white shirt carrying a pitcher of water was coming towards me. I turned my head. Somebody was behind me, way in the distance. I knew who it was. But she was so far away. I turned, ran, stumbled.

I woke up, sickly unease rising through me. The floor-to-ceiling curtains were shadows in the darknes. I could make out the vague outlines of the gilt-edged prints of Ottoman Istanbul that hung in a row on the wall, like Janissaries, the Sultan’s guards, standing to attention.

Then I felt something move. There was something in the bed with me.

Bloody hell! I swung my fist, slammed it into the mattress, bounced up out of the bed, scrambled for the light switch by the bathroom door.

The room flooded with jaundiced light.

There was nothing. Nothing in the bed. Nothing under it. Was I going mad?

Relief soaked through me. Had it been an animal, a spider, something like that? My skin crawled. I should never have left the window open.

The phone rang.

‘Mr Ryan?’ A woman’s voice, anxious. It was the receptionist who’d given me that envelope. I sat on the bed, cradling the telephone against my bare shoulder. The gossamer breeze from the window felt like water running over my skin.

‘Yes?’

‘Two men are on the way up to see you, Mr Ryan.’

‘What?’

The line went dead. I could hear a truck grinding its gears outside.

For a second I didn’t understand why she’d called. Then it came to me. She was warning me.

A sharp knock – rat tat tat – sounded from the door. The do-not-disturb sign hanging on the doorknob vibrated.

That was quick. Then the knock came again. It was even more insistent this time.

I walked over to the door, put my eye to the viewer. Nothing. Just blackness. Was it broken?

‘Come on, Mr Ryan,’ an officious female voice called out. Someone English.

‘Hold on,’ I replied. I grabbed a fresh T-shirt from my bag and pulled it over my head. An even sharper knock sounded.

Rat-tat-tat-tat.

‘Coming.’ What the hell was the hurry? I pulled on my chinos, pushed my feet into suede moccasins.

Another knock.

RAT TAT-TAT TAT-TAT.

‘Come on!’ She sounded petulant, as if she hadn’t heard my replies, or had heard, but didn’t think I was moving fast enough.

I jerked the door open but held my foot against it, just in case I needed to close it in a hurry.

An attractive-looking woman was standing outside. She was in her late twenties, I guessed, and was wearing a tight high-necked black T-shirt. Her face was symmetrical, her eyes dark green, serious, her black hair pulled back tight. She had a thin gold chain around her neck. Despite her slim frame, she was clearly someone who could look after herself.

And she was holding an identity card in my face. I saw a severe-looking face and an official stamp, a triangle with a crown and the letters EIIR above it, and the words ‘British Consulate’ below. Then the card vanished before I had a chance to read any more. I stood up a little straighter. And then it came to me. This was the woman from one of Alek’s photos.

‘Come with me, Mr Ryan. Now.’ She glanced towards the lifts.

‘There are some people on the way up that you don’t want to meet. They were demanding to know your room number down at reception. You have to come with me. I mean it.’ She looked up and down the corridor, as if expecting to be interrupted at any moment. I heard a metallic thrum as the lift rose towards us. Then there was a creaking noise. It had stopped at a lower floor, maybe the one below us.

I could smell her perfume. It was faint, sweet.

‘Did you know Alek?’

A flicker of hesitation crossed her face.

‘My name’s Isabel Sharp. I was Alek’s liaison officer at the Consulate. Come on, Mr Ryan. If you don’t want to end up like him.’

I felt my back pocket. My wallet was there. I could get another room pass. I was dressed. I had my shoes on.

‘OK.’

She moved quickly. My room door closed behind me with a clunk. She was already halfway to a door down the corridor with an ‘Exit’ sign above it.

She held the door open for me, closed it after I’d passed through.

‘I thought I was gonna be met at the airport?’ I said, still unsure why I was following her.

‘That was a little misunderstanding,’ she said. ‘But I’m here now.’ She started down the carpeted stairs. I followed.

I was going to ask her why she was moving so fast, when I heard a juddering bang above us, as if someone had slammed a door open.

‘They’re coming,’ she said. I barely heard her. A muffled clatter of footsteps echoed from above.

She took the next set of stairs in two jumps.

Someone shouted. Then a crisp popping sound filled the stairwell. It was accompanied by a shrill pinging near me. A rain of concrete chips and dust fell around my head. Something had hit the wall above me!

‘Bastards,’ she said, in a low voice, as if she was talking to herself. I was barely keeping up with her.

My heart was pounding.

Something struck the metal handrail behind me. It squealed. I jerked my hand away from it.

Adrenaline pumped through me, tingling every muscle. The hair on my body stood up straight. My scalp felt tight.

I was taking three steps at a time, sometimes four. I could feel the rough concrete under the thin carpet as I landed on each step. Then Isabel almost fell. I put a hand under her arm, held her up. She regained her footing. We kept going.

The sound of running feet, voices, wasn’t far above us now. They were catching up. I looked behind. All I could see was a shadowy blur coming down.

Isabel’s face was pale.

The backs of my legs were straining. Who the hell were they?

At the bottom of the stairwell I overtook Isabel, barged through the fire exit door, held it open for her. The deafening noise of an alarm rang out above our heads.

Then she was sprinting like an Olympic runner down the deserted concrete laneway in front of us. I went after her, my lungs dragging in air. She was heading for a black Range Rover, a giant cockroach resting on oversized tyres.